Weekly Low Down on Kids Books – Easter
With Easter this past weekend, we spent the week with Betty Bunny.
(Fellow Christians, please don’t harass me about how Easter is not about bunnies, but our Lord Jesus Christ because Easter is actually a celebration of the goddess Oestre and fertility and the spring equinox and all that and we Christians kinda sharked the holiday for our own purposes. We celebrate Christ’s resurrection separate from Easter in our house. Pagans and lovers of Mother Earth please don’t harass me about Betty Bunny not having anything to do with celebrating nature, I know, I know.)
Betty Bunny
We also read If Beaver Had a Fever
The Weekly Low Down on Kids Books 1/18/12
Come Back, Cat
How to love a cat: Hold him gently in your lap. But don’t panic if he bites – he’s only playing. Be careful not scare him away. Listen for his ‘motor.’ He’s telling you he loves you, too.
Nodset writes a simple and easy to understand story of trial and error as a little girl chases the cat she wants to play with and how he react. She presents a very basic and child-like dilemma: “I like you cat. Why don’t you come? Don’t you like me?” with answers the child can derive from the next step and the illustrations “Then I’ll come to you, cat.” Throughout the book, you learn to pet softly, don’t squeeze too hard and a number of useful lessons for a soon to be young pet owner. Ayla loved pointing out where the cat was on the page, and of course, my meow sounds.
The Night Pirates
I love this one! And Ayla thought it was pretty great too, which is always a plus. Reminiscent of Where the Wild Things Are, Tom goes to sleep only to be bombarded by girl pirates and taken away to a treasure island via his floating house. Its pretty awesome and the illustrations are fun and colorful.
Pooh Loves
Ayla is a sucker for all things Pooh, even though I didn’t really introduce her to him. She picked out a Winnie the Pooh book on the first shopping trip to a bookstore we had together after she was walking and I allowed her to pick stuff up off the shelf. She handed it to me and was very excited to get to take it out of the store with her. Then, this Pooh book she picked out at the library all by herself as well. There’s something about Pooh, forever and always, and this one is exceptionally sweet.
The Lion and The Mouse
This is one we’re going to have try another time. It’s all pictures and no words, but it’s a picture book and not a board book. Ayla kept demanding that I read to her, but I had to kind of just tell her a story. The illustrations are based off of Aesop’s Fables and it’s been too long since I’ve read them to recite the tale. If you pick this up, be familiar with the tale so that you’re prepared to help walk your kid/baby through the book. Your kid makes you feel like a pretty crappy parent when they open a book and all you can say is “Uhhh, that’s a lion…”
The Low Down on Kid’s Books
How do Dinosaurs Clean Their Rooms – Yolen
This is Ayla’s first dinosaur book and the first thing we’ve read by Jane Yolen. Cute, clever, and rhyming this is great board book for a 14 month old learning to put her toys away before she leaves a room and goes to another. Its quickly becoming an afternoon favorite.
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs – Barrett
Ayla and I read this recently for the first time. She seemed to enjoy it when I made the action loud enough, but its definitely going to be more exciting when she’s a little older. All in all, though, it does not live up to its hype.
Punctuation Station – Bryan P. Cleary
Ayla and I love Bryan P. Cleary books and are trying to collect them all. We checked this one out of the library this week, and as usual she found the rhymes exciting, even if she doesn’t quite know what they mean yet!
The Sea of Bath – Bob Logan
Ayla loves this one. She’s really into the illustrations and there’s the perfect amount of story per page, so she is able to sit still for just the right amount of time before she turns the page for you. We checked this copy out of the library, but I think I’ll have to go buy a copy soon.
Where to, Little Wombat – Charles Fuge
Ayla wasn’t sure about sitting through the first page, but by the second she was hooked. The first time we read this she made me read it three times in a row and carried it around the house for an hour after that. The illustrations are fun and she loved being introduced to new animals she hadn’t seen before: wombat, emu, and koala. Plus, the story is super cute too.
Shop Kid’s Books
How Alcott Raises Little Women
Title: Little Women
Author: Louisa May Alcott
Publisher: Little, Brown
Genre: Young Adult Classics
Length: 502 pages
I don’t remember learning to read, as I did it from such a young age. I do, however, remember the first books I fell in love with and the first books I read that were difficult for my limited vocabulary. Laura Ingalls Wilder I fell in love with first, I read the entire series several times by the end of first grade. Little Women, however, I fell in love with and learned from in second grade. Little Women taught me new words and phrases, culture, and how I wanted to live.
Josephine March has been one of my heroes since I was seven and first read about her chopping off all her luxurious hair. As a young girl, I identified quite well with her “one beauty” (that amazing hair) and tomboyish ways. I myself, was a ruddy, freckled girl, often found either playing tag football with boys at recess or perched in an oak tree reading a book, hair flowing every which way that my mother did not allow me to cut. My first significant hair cut, I donated two feet to locks of love, and who else was on my mind? Jo March.
I re-read the book multiple times before I left elementary school, getting more and more out of it each time as my reading skills improved. And despite cherishing it always, I set the book aside and did not read it again until my twenty-seventh year, this year, to my one year old daughter.
I opened it up a week or so before Christmas, not realizing it would spur a desire to re-read it every Christmas with my kid for the rest of her life if she likes it as much as I do. It’s such a great Christmas book! Upon this fresh re-read, I also discovered many other things that my brain had forgotten, but my soul must have internalized. For instance, the girls are all distraught and Hannah, bless her soul, “came to the rescue armed with a coffee-pot.”
Like every good American, I am wholly addicted to that black magical brew, it’s in our veins and culture, look at how well Starbucks has taken off. But my family did not keep coffee readily available, my dad won’t touch the stuff and my mom’s mother died of cancer the doctors blamed on her caffeine intake so she never kept it around growing up. So part of me wonders if Alcott played a role in my introduction to it, as I don’t remember a time when I did not love it. I remember sneaking cups of it from the employee break room at the bus barn where I waited with my bus driver between routes in elementary school. In hindsight, I believe it was the reverence that writers hold for it, the way it is talked about in books, that drove me to love it so much, and it very well may have begun with Little Women.
Then, there is Theodore Laurence. I believe every guy friend’s worth that I ever had my whole life was measured against the character of Laurie. He is whimsical, gallant, a rascal and a gentleman. Theodore Laurence is handsome, a friend, and all around a good time. Every girl needs a Teddy-Dear in her adolescent life and if you can’t get one in the real world, its time for yet another read of Little Women so you can live vicariously through Jo!
Jo March taught me to love, to read, to pursue life with a fiery passion, and how to pick my friends. It was Jo March that sparked the first desires in me to be a writer. It was Little Women, and the romance of Jo and the Professor, that set the stage for me to fall in love with the art of Jane Austen and the Brontes. It was the pen of Louisa May Alcott that taught me how to really enjoy books and the thrilling life they have to offer.
Exposure is Everything
My whole life I have been enthralled by the world of books. As a child, I was an avid reader the school librarian could not keep appeased. I lived in the worlds of Laura Ingalls, L.M. Montgomery, Louisa May Alcott, Charles Dickens, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, and more. Although I went to college to study business, as soon as I was out I sought a position in a bookstore; my dream was to run the literature section, and I did. I worked there for some years, fully stocked up my home collection, became the inventory manager, but then had a baby and so left the company.
We have 17 overflowing bookshelves in our house and books stacked on every available end table in between. I have been gathering up children’s titles throughout my pregnancy until now for my daughter, preparing for a lust of the written word comparable to mine.
People keep warning me that she may not want to read, she may not like it like I do. They keep telling me I cannot force my child to enjoy my hobbies.
I am not forcing her. I am making the written word available. She sees books everywhere, she sees people enjoying books everywhere. In addition to our own collection that we read from every day, we visit the public library for group readings and she sees people outside her family unit gathering to enjoy a book.
My daughter is one year old, and already she often chooses Eric Carle over a stuffed animal. She brings me Rainbow Fish and expects me to read it aloud while she sorts her blocks. It seems sometimes as though she is not actually listening, just sorting her belongings, until I stop reading and she looks up and points at the book. My daughter sorts through her picture books and flips through the pages, she even has her own little cushioned rocking chair she climbs into to do it. She rocks and pretends to read while I lounge and read in our library in our house.
My daughter loves books, and I am both amazed and proud. I implore the world to make books available to their children from a young age. Read aloud to them, they cannot help but be interested and thirsty for stories and knowledge.
